Comments on: The Incredible Shrinking Software

By: Dan

Dan — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 12:21:11 +0000

Dave, sounds great

By: Dave Gilbert

Dave Gilbert — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 12:16:27 +0000

Hi Dan,

Your applet has inspired me to try to put together a script that partitions the JFreeChart classes and will let you build a jar file with a smaller subset of classes that relate only to the features you want to use. I’ll keep you posted on how that goes…

Dave Gilbert
JFreeChart Project Leader

By: john watson

john watson — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 17:05:07 +0000

I had a discussion with a developer a few months back about this sort of thing. The idea there was to use test suites to determine which code wasn’t needed and have the build system delete it.
I was wondering about trying to recompile things like jboss, spring, hibernate, etc with just the parts I need to try and get my deployable files down to size.

By: Dan

Dan — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 16:25:45 +0000

Martin, it does take a little bit of trial-and-error to figure out exactly which combination of keep options is required. However, I have found that, unlike other obfuscators I tried, there is always a way to get it to work.

As for reflection Proguard will normally detect it and warn you so that you can tweak your configuration to preserve the appropriate names.

By: Martin Wildam

Martin Wildam — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 16:22:07 +0000

I tried Proguard but unfortunately it generates errors instead of obfuscating or shrinking. And this altough I tested several configurations and my programs are some easy libraries (no big project) but just a few library dependencies.

Another problem with it is that for classes dynamically loaded later on or external scripts may not work any more due to class name changes and so on.

By: Dan

Dan — Sun, 09 Nov 2008 21:35:25 +0000

Jos, good point, in fact Pack200 is the subject of my latest post (see http://blog.uncommons.org/2008/11/09/smaller-java/)

By: Jos Hirth

Jos Hirth — Sun, 09 Nov 2008 21:16:40 +0000

Obfuscation (well, the minimizing kind) can help, but better compression can help so much more. Pack200 is supported since 1.5 and LZMAInputStream only adds about 7kb. If both compression schemes are combined (Pack200 actually doesn’t compress much on its own) you can get really impressive compression ratios.

http://kaioa.com/svg/compression_ratio.svgz

By: Richard Rabins

Richard Rabins — Sun, 09 Nov 2008 20:20:18 +0000

Your subhead “1995 called, it wants its RIA technology back” made me chuckle. As I watch the fuss and movement towards RIAs, I can’t help but recall when Microsoft and, to a lesser extent, Sun were accused of “balkenizing” the Web back in the mid-90s because they believed Web experiences should be as rich as the desktop. BWAAAA went the thin client/open standards crowd. Now the trend is towards Flash and Silverlight. Someone please tell me how this is ANY different from a hosted ActiveX control or Java applet???? I’m all for rich user experiences. But I think ti’s funny to see how what once once derided is now the big fat trend. Someone please explain to me how Flash and Silverlight are not proprietary? As a tools vendor, we saw the handwriting on the wall long ago. We added Web UI capabilities a few years ago, and last year, AJAX on the UI and to reduce database latency (an area that does not get enough attention/credit from developers, IMHO). That way developers don’t have to be as concerned (if at all) with download size, provided the AJAX we generate is efficient. That’s not to say that demand won’t motivate us to add other RIA technologies down the road, but right now, AJAX seems a great, platform neutral way to go.

By: New Adventures in Software » Smaller Java

New Adventures in Software » Smaller Java — Sun, 09 Nov 2008 20:02:14 +0000

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